A Look into Escape Rooms and Experience Design

If you’ve ever participated in a real life escape room, you know the drill — solve a series of clues in an hour (or so) in order to escape and win the game. Good escape rooms will have escapees talking about it long after the event is over, while bad experience will have them… complaining.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a fair share of escape rooms with friends. Through these experiences, I’ve found some things that seem to elevate the escape room experience and others that actually reduce the thrill. These experience enhancers and detractors should not only be helpful to real-life game designers but anyone looking to make their physical experiences better.

The Detractors

Too Many People in a Room

Most escape rooms require a minimum number of people. Many times this is because there are puzzles or challenges that require at least two or more people to participate at the same time. Other times, it may be because of the number of puzzles involved — requiring more brain power than the average person could handle at a time.

When there isn’t really a reason for having a specified number of people, the experience starts to fall apart. People begin standing around, wondering what they should be doing. Some people even may start creating new (erroneous) ways of examining problems, that can lead teams astray. Though confusion can be a good thing, every person should have a purpose so that they can feel validated.

Playing With Uninterested Parties or Awkward Groups

Related to playing with large groups, when two or more parties are brought together that have little to no interest in each other, problems can result. This often happens as a result of companies wanting to get as many people through their rooms as possible — cost per head, being a likely culprit. An escape room can seem less like a fun group experience and more like teams incidentally discovering their way out.

A better solution is allowing people to form their own group and have a per session charge. If two or more teams need to be placed together, techniques should be employed to bond people together and have them unite towards their common goal of escape.

Incorrect Puzzles

Sometimes, what solution can seem obvious to you may not be so obvious to others. This is especially made frustrating when a given solution is actually incorrect.

Take the case of a puzzle where you needed to transfer the number of points on the outside of a shape into numbers. A square would be four, a star with six points would be six, a triangle would be three. Thus, it follows that a circle would be infinite and not zero — which was the “correct” answer.

This puzzle, like many others, could have been designed in such a way that, even with no infinity on a keypad, zero could be represented.

Bad Input Systems

Speaking of keypad, poorly designed escape rooms do not let players know how to input their solutions. A lock with numbers on the side, but no defined place to align the numbers can be problematic. A keypad without some apparent way to submit an answer can also lead to a variety of problems that can detract from the overall experience.

Have you ever seen a door that you wanted to push, but you should have actually pulled it? These are called “Norman Doors.”

Much like how you shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get into a place, players shouldn’t have to figure out how to use a device. Remove inputs that resemble “Norman Doors” and start elevating your experience a notch.

The Enhancers

Difficulty Scalability [right amount of time, difficult at the right time also]

Have you ever tried hitting your head against a wall to gain access to the other side? Doors are much more convenient an option, no?

Sometimes puzzles can be so difficult and frustrating that they cause people to give up. Scaling up the difficulty of a room both in terms of the number of players and progress can not only eliminate this problem of feeling defeated, but cause players to want to further progress through a game and feel like an experience is worth it.

Small wins can keep players excited and engaged in the goal of escaping a room in time. Knowing that puzzles may get harder down the line, can cause players to spend only an essential amount of time on solving puzzles in the beginning that may not be completely necessary to solve — such as in the case of many non-linear puzzles.

Non-linear puzzle solving

Somewhat related to there being too many people on a team, non-linear puzzle solving gives more people an experience to be hands on and feel useful. Non-linear means that one puzzle solution is not necessarily needed to solve the next. There may be times when a single answer is needed as a means of getting to another room, but many puzzles and their solutions can provide the ability to remain linear and still progress the story — for instance, many puzzle results creating the answer to an acrostic.

These types of rooms can be more complex to create but often provide a more solid and rewarding experience at the end.

Uniqueness

Another room with a zombie in it or one in which a laser light needs to be reflected to trigger something? Escape rooms with the typical tropes in them are a dime a dozen.

Great escape rooms take what is known and mix things up a little. Maybe a room is made more unique in terms of story, maybe in terms of set design. Perhaps players all have their own roles, maybe their own unique rooms to start?

There are many things that can be done with the general concept of escaping a room that, as long as a room is more unique, will have people coming back for more.

Theme Immersion

Last but not least, a great escape room experience really brings players into the world in which the game is set. No longer are players simply in an office building, but instead they are back in the 1930’s during the Prohibition Age, or on mad search to find serum to stop and impending zombie outbreak.

One effective way, besides set, that I’ve seen this done is by having players wear clothes that fit their character. This can be a simple way of enhancing the players’ immersion within the story.

An immersive theme can be the difference between “That was fun” and “Wow, I was really worried that we were going to be attacked by a monster!” Strive for the later and you’ll be designing better escape room experiences.

What factors are important to you when experience and escape room?